XML loading, dynamic buttons, dynamic text fields

1

My last thread kind of died, I guess, so here’s another one that I hope will get me some help; it has an updated FLA attached and what I think to be some better descriptions of my problems… I know I’m totally indebted to whomever will help, but this is an emergency and I need some timely advice.

so here’s the FLA, XML, and some sample images: kirupaTest2.zip

  1. I pretty much have the enlarged pictures loading I guess, which was my major problem before, but it doesn’t matter because I can’t get the code to “know” which of the dynamic thumbnails has been clicked (by “know”, I mean return an index value, say 0 through 7 if there are 8 projects, that I can use to access that particular project in the array of 8 projects in the rest of the code)… So if the third movieclip thumbnail were clicked, I’d like “2” to come up somehow… I’ve tried this code, which is kind of lame, I know, based off of the idea of each of the thumbnail movieclips’ names ending in their index number:

//"this" is the button that was pressed; would return a string ending in
//thumberMC_<number of whichever movieclip thumb was clicked>
var: testString:String = this; 
//storing how many characters are in the string above...
var: stringNumb:Number = testString.length;
//using that value to take off the last string (hopefully the number)
var: finalString = testString.charAt(stringNumb);

And that didn’t work. (The code above was entered around line 71 in the layer “actions”; it’s gone now)

  1. An even bigger problem is I have some containers being drawn dynamically from height and width values pulled from an XML file. When I test the code that creates the objects using hard-coded values, it works fine; say if I put 481 in for the width and 375 for the height. But if I try to do it (sort of) dynamically like:

var picHeight:Number = projects[5].bigPics[0].picHeight
var picWidth:Number = projects[5].bigPics[0].picWidth

it gets all screwed up; please try it for yourself in the supplied FLA. It’s hard to describe what goes wrong; some things are drawn, and others aren’t. I think it’s because the objects are trying to draw before they have the data to draw with. This can be seen at lines 129 and 130.

  1. Lastly, there’s a dynamic textfield I’m trying to create that never shows up for some reason. Again, you could see in the FLA (in the “createDrawer” function around line 424).

If I can clarify, please let me know.